Saturday, 19 July 2014

Erdogan ratchets up his anti-Semitic rhetoric.

Turkish Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan lashed out at Israel in his most anti-Semitic
speech yet.

He compared
Bayit Yehudi Knesset member, Ayelet Shaked, to Hitler on Tuesday, 15 July when
he criticized Israel’s actions against terrorists in the Gaza Strip.

Her remarks referred to an article by deceasedMakor Rishoneditor Eli Elitzur from 2002, at the
height of the second intifada, from which the Bayit Yehudi MK quoted on her
Facebook page on July 1;

“The Palestinian people declared war on
us, and we must fight back. Not an operation, not low-intensity, not destroying
terror infrastructure... This is a war between two nations. Who is the enemy?
The Palestinian people. Why? Ask them, they started,” Elitzur wrote.

“This
mentality is no different to that of Hitler,” Erdogan said.

He referred to Israel’s aerial
campaign against Hamas and Islamic Jihad targets in Gaza, as “systematic
genocide.”

This is the man that condemnedanti-Semitism and Zionism in the same sentence at a UN speech in Vienna in febraury
2013. “We must
consider — just like Zionism or anti-Semitism or fascism — Islamophobia as a
crime against humanity." Notice
not anti-Zionism, but Zionism itself, an expression of Jewish
self-determination and independence.

On Thursday Erdogan
went further. “Israel is a country threatening the world’s peace. It’s a
country that threatens the Middle East peace. [Israel] has never pretended to
be pro-peace. It has always tormented [the Palestinian people], and today it is
continuing to do so,”

He stressed that
good relations withIsrael were
impossible under the current circumstances.“The
government and I will never look positively [at Israel] as long as we are in
power … [Israel] may seem like the winner for now. But it will eventually be
defeated.” Erdoğan seemed to be
echoing the Hamas ambition of defeating and destroying the Jewish State of
Israel.

He repeated his “systemic genocide”
nonsense at a meeting of Islamic scholars in Istanbul to mark Ramadan. “We have been witnessing this systematic
genocide every Ramadan since 1948. The world remains silent because those who
lost their lives are Palestinian.”

With lies like this, Erdogan encourages Islamic
scholars into a religious conflict with Israel.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a leading international
Jewish rights NGO, labelling Turkey’s current climate as a “prescription for
disaster" referring to violent pro-Palestinian protests that
led the Israeli government reduce its diplomatic presence in Turkey.

"Recent
acts of violence, rioting, threats and insults against Israeland Jews--including Turkey's historic
Jewish community--by national leaders and personalities, are prescriptions for
disaster," Rabbi Marvin Hier,
founder and dean of the Wiesenthal Center and Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the
Center's associate dean, said in a statement released on July 18.

"When
Prime Minister Erdoǧan falsely
describes Israel's self-defense against Hamas as 'genocide'; when calls for the
elimination of Jews are backed by the mayor of Ankara; when a popular Turkish
singer tweets that it will be 'Muslims who will bring an end to those Jews' and
'May God bless Hitler', it cannot be business as usual."

"Finally, we call onNATOSecretary General Rasmussen to denounce the anti-Jewish
campaign in Turkey.NATO was
created to defend democracies and freedom, not bullies and bigots," the letter concluded.

With
such a poisoned atmosphere, it is clear why Israel rejected Turkey’s efforts to
be the broker for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.